User blog:Djparadroid/Save Scumming and other dirty words
As I entered the Pit for the twentieth time, carting stacks of food to the Safe Room for checks and measures it started to wear on me. All of this information is readily available to individuals at a single click and here we are having to take a chisel to the same block of marble Codey McGee has already reduced to a statue with hilariously masked genitalia. Even the racial penalites that in part have been slapped on everything willy nilly could have just been revealed in patch notes and be a no-brainer for us to amend the posts here. But when on my deeper runs when the game starts to get tense and you begin to happen upon the mobs where the data we've found is scarse I can't help but mirthlessly murder them at my earliest convenience. Sure, I'm community-minded - just have a look at the amount of hours I've put into the Wiki, but I just can't let Sammy Salamander flame me and bring my seven hour run to an end just so I can add a line of text to a page. All of these thoughts started to make me remember save scumming. OK, so we were all young once. Some of us were young when video games were also. When we were told to avoid the facsimilie of 3.5" and 5.25" discs in an amusing song. Back when every second game was brutally hard through combination of bugs and for the sake of extending what would otherwise be a short experience. Back when I had no problem going into my X-Wing config file and bumping up the AI of my completely incompetent wingmen because unlike the Imperials, Rebel ships shouldn't be exploding every half-minute on a simple escort mission. So what if I find myself a Moon Bear Berserker and decide I want to dance around and see what it does? If I want to have it die half a dozen times to see if anything else falls out of the extra orifices I give it? Where does the morality of the action fall? Much like this background I feel it quite grey. While I ruminate on it, I still can't find myself doing it, despite the fact that it feels like the Stalker is actually moving the Pit around it rather than walking. And why? Well, I suppose if it was that simple there wouldn't still be gaps in the Wiki. We still haven't done everything. And if no elite SOTS:TPer is forthcoming and bestowes upon us the wealth of their knowledge gleaned from continually making The Pit their personal dogsbody then it's up to us to do it. To bite and kick and scratch and do whatever we can to finish each run. Guiding your neoprene bug, flying spacedolphin or just plain ape to the last chamber and being greeted by that completion screen is what it's all about. And if a few pieces of information just so happen to fall out of the sky you can be sure that the Wiki will still be there; ready to accept anything you find. Go Deep then Go Home. Category:Blog posts